


the gold room

by arbitrarily



Category: True Detective
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Anal Sex, Drunk Sex, Infidelity, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Partners to Lovers, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-21
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2020-01-04 06:56:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18338477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: He's changing their story.





	the gold room

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scioscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/gifts).



> Your letter was an absolute blast to work with, in particular your ideas about taking the nonlinear aspect of the show and making it into Time! Travel! This was a lot of fun to write, and I do hope you enjoy!

 

 

He wakes in a motel room, alone. He drags himself out of bed. He sits on the edge of it and he looks around the room. A motel room—the Sunrise Motel per the small placard set on top of the television. He wants to believe he stayed the night here alone. The bed’s messy, no other tell any other body occupied it with him. He wants to believe, but he can't quite. A headache has started to pound behind his eyes, not unlike a hangover. He doesn’t remember ever being here. He can’t recall a time he woke up in a motel room like this. Dread lifts up his throat as he makes himself look in the mirror. Not that long back then; far enough back though. No gray in his hair yet, but the lines are already creased around his eyes even when he keeps his face still. 

Wayne sighs. He sits back down at the end of the bed and picks up the remote, turns the television on. Katie Couric’s face fills the screen. Her lips are moving before he starts listening. “—June 17, 1992, this is _Today_.”

“June 17, 1992,” Wayne says. That answers that. “Shit.”

Like he told Amelia, he ain’t doing this on purpose. 

The first time it happened, he’d gone to bed and woken up in ’80. November 7, 1980. Scared the shit out of Roland, talking the nonsense that he was, and when he woke again, he was in bed with Amelia, right where he had expected to wake the day before. The first time resulted in a prolonged stay at Baptist Health. Cat scans and nerve conductions and then neuropsych consults and then just plain old psych. “The year may be 2000,” the doc had said, but only after Wayne had confirmed the date (and the name of the hospital and his own children’s names as well as the name of the current president) on his own steam. “But we aren’t fixed that way yet. Star Wars-like. Time travel,” he said with a small smirk.

“The didn’t do no time travel in Star Wars,” Amelia said later, in the car, after he was discharged. Like that was even the point. They drove back to the house while Amelia talked about second opinions and a real good neurologist she’d heard tell of in Conway, and it was all very much like her. Take a problem, a mystery, let’s say, and analyze the facts. Make the puzzle fit. He was her puzzle now. Couldn’t much say he cared for it any.

Wayne came to reach his own conclusion. He calls this divine dumb luck. Providence, not insanity. That’s what this is. A chance to make things right, if not for Tom Purcell then for Roland. He owed him. He owes him.

He steps outside. His ride’s waiting for him, the old Buick he sold in ’93 or ’94. He chuckles under his breath; he may not remember the Sunrise Motel, but he sure as hell remembers that car. He feels for the keys in his jacket pocket and then he gets behind the wheel. Like he says to Amelia: he ain’t doing this on purpose.

 

 

 

 

Wayne drives. No direction. He circles back through a town and a time he already lived in.

This feeling of being utterly lost in his own past is new to him. He usually has some anchoring point, something he can identify and set himself correctly back in time. “June 17, 1992.” Means nothing. He’d already left police by then, already over at the University; can’t be anything doing for them here.

He has made some minimal sense of what this is, now that it’s happened well over a couple dozen times to him. It's random; no predictability to it. Not to when it will happen and not to when he will find himself. He’ll wake. He’ll get no say in where. Couldn't tell you how many times he whispered it to himself like a fucking incantation, November 7, 1980, any time before three o’clock. Didn’t do nothing. He woke up in ’80, but weeks later. Woke up in ’81, in ’90. He doesn't always get the luxury of waking in bed, like he did this morning. Most times, it’s just like his brain comes back online, the Wayne Hays of 2000 logged in as the current user. 

He only gets the day. That’s another thing he’s figured. The second midnight hits and the date changes, he’s booted like some kind of deranged Cinderella, regardless of the time he got to spend in the past. Forty-four minutes is his shortest record. He woke breathless and confused besides Amelia.

He doesn’t usually return to the nothing events like this. For a long time, he waited for the morning he’d wake up, back in ‘nam. Never came. This isn’t about that— he can see that now. This is about the knot that lives in his gut, a tangle of guilt and fear and mocking regret. He’s gone back to that junkyard with Roland twice already. Nothing doing trying to help the Purcells before the bad that’s gonna come befalls them. It’s already too late. Time is a stubborn thing, he’s found. Doesn’t like nobody coming around and changing her order. Taking from her what she’s already claimed. Wayne knows that now. Don’t mean he’s stopped trying.

He brakes at a red light. He rubs at the base of his neck, right over his left collarbone. He glances in the mirror as the engine idles. Teeth marks, he thinks. He runs his fingers over them, studiously ignoring the low drop of fear inside him. The same sort of fear that comes with a morning after a night with too much drink. He’s never liked the thought of what he might get up to off the leash, away from himself. He is traveling too often away from himself. It’s normal for a man to worry. He passes his thumb over the mark again; he can’t remember the mouth it came from. He can guess, but he won’t. That fear, again.

He breathes deep and easy like the doctor had recommended. Drums his fingers on the steering wheel. Misses when the light goes green, jolted into action by the car behind him, the horn piercing through his thoughts. He raises a hand in apology and he drives. It’s a terrible thing, he knows, for a man to be lost in his own life. 

When he makes the turn onto Shoepick Lane, he can’t say he's surprised at himself. It always comes back to this.

 

 

 

 

The second time he returned to the junkyard, Wayne hasn’t got the words for that wild relief he felt. The night air was crisp and mean and violently alive. The body he occupied was fresh and tested just enough within its limits. He held a gun in his hand.

“Hey, Purple, you still with me? Or two beers all it take to get your sorry ass stupid drunk?”

It had floored Wayne, that first time he came back, and it caught him by the throat that second return, too. Were things ever this simple between him and Roland? Shooting the shit, downing beers out at the junkyard. The greatest tragedy they got worth jawing about Steve McQueen? It was tempting to blame the case; he’s laid so much blame at the foot of that altar already. It’s easy to blame everything that’s come to in his life on one case. 

He had looked over at Roland. He ain’t know what’s coming yet.

“I’m a cheap date,” Wayne said.

He hadn’t let himself realize how much he had missed Roland, not until he had been dropped here. That fondness in him, warm and familiar, was like finding something you had forgot you lost, only to be that much more relieved now that it was yours again.

Roland took aim with his gun as a rat scurried somewhere before them. Wayne watched him, tried to better commit him to memory.

It ain’t no small thing to try to change the past. History was written in ink and it was hard work to smudge it, let alone rewrite it. 

“I know a place we gotta be, man,” he said to Roland. 

Roland had snorted. “The fuck you got a place. I got a beer needs finishing.”

And what could he say? A call’s gonna come in, we gotta get moving. Two kids gone missing, and we might already be too late. I know where the boy’s body’s gonna be. I know what’s gonna come next. I'll be gone in only a couple of hours.

No way a man could say any that and still sound sane.

“Wait for it,” Wayne said under his breath.

“What’s that?” Roland said, and then the call came in.

 

 

 

 

“It don’t get any easier, but I’m trying, I guess. I’m trying. That’s something.”

They’re back in that kitchen again, the Purcell house. Tom’s crying or he’s trying not to cry or everything he says makes him sound like a man on the verge of tears. He’s sober now, he’s saying, and Wayne frowns. He steps over to the calendar on the wall: June 1990. Tom’s not supposed to be here. He’s supposed to be living alone. Not in this house, not Shoepick Lane. 

Roland is talking to Tom in low, calming tones as Tom scoops coffee grounds into the filter. Wayne watches Roland with him. One benefit of whatever you wanna call this—time travel, he thinks; it's time travel—is that it affords old eyes a second glance. He’s seeing things different.

Roland’s face is pure earnestness as he speaks to Tom. It shouldn’t look right on a face like his. But both Roland and Tom are so open to emotion in a way Wayne never learned. Never let himself learn. There’s a difference, he knows, between the two. Wayne never got the luxury.

Wayne lets his gaze travel over the kitchen, the family room, this empty house. Tom’s not supposed to be here. Wayne changed something, he must’ve changed something, but he couldn’t tell you what. Can’t begin to figure that thread of causality that led to Tom Purcell losing his entire family but keeping this fucking house. 

When they move to leave, Wayne pats Tom on the arm, clumsy and awkward. “You be careful now,” he says to him. Tom frowns. 

It’s not enough. He doesn’t know how you stop a man from what’s coming, when the only advantage you’ve got is at random and a single day at a time. He doesn’t know. He keeps trying.

 

 

 

 

Wayne keeps multiple notebooks now. In the present, in 2000. Each year he revisits gets its own notebook. Unsurprisingly, 1980 has the most new information. Three full notebooks worth. He doesn’t tell Amelia about this. He doesn’t like the worry she gets in her eyes when he says something that doesn’t match with the present as she knows it. As they’re both meant to know it.

They don’t talk about the Purcell case as a rule between them, but sometimes Wayne can’t help himself. It’s in the rear view for her, but he’s still living it. 

The two of them are eating dinner alone when Wayne mentions something about Roland’s limp, how stubborn he was about it. He chuckles quietly to himself. The laugh dies in his mouth when he sees Amelia’s face.

Amelia has paused, her fork lifted halfway to her mouth. “What limp?”

Fear judders inside of Wayne. He lives his life above a trapdoor now; he never knows when it’s going to open beneath him. “You know, back in ’80. When he got shot.”

Amelia carefully sets her fork back down on the table. She places her hands down flat, like a tarot card reader. She is so patient with him, and he thinks he hates that the most. “Wayne. Roland never got shot.”

“The shootout at Woodard’s place, you know? I saw it. I mean, I was there.”

Amelia’s face is tight and more than a little sad. “Okay, baby,” she says softly.

 

 

 

 

Van Halen is playing. The sink is running. Wayne looks up. A bar bathroom, flyers posted to the mirror, an open mic night advertised for that Friday. No mention of the year. His face looks back at him, young but tired, in the dirty glass. 

He shuts off the faucet and steps back out into the noisy bar. He spots Roland, seated at the bar, the barstool beside him empty. Before he can reach him, he’s intercepted. The stranger claps a hand on his shoulder and squeezes. A cop, he can’t remember his fucking name. Hopes it doesn’t matter.

“Congrats, man. That was some good fucking work there.”

Wayne nods, doesn’t say anything. There’s that dread again, thick and threatening to choke.

“Always knew that fucking Woodard was behind it, always knew.”

He knows exactly when he is now.

“No one got hurt, did they?” Can’t help himself asking. This cop looks at Wayne like he’s nuts, but he’s clearly too far gone on the drink to think anything more of it than an eccentricity of Wayne’s.

“Nah, ‘less you counting Woodard’s brains splattered all over the fucking place.” The dread in Wayne has cooled to an uncomfortable resignation. Men meant to die were always gonna end up just that: dead.

When Wayne finally approaches Roland at the bar, he still can’t shake that pervading sense of wrongness. It should’ve been different. 

“There you are. Thought maybe you cut out before your round.”

Wayne flags down the bartender. “Nah, I wouldn’t leave you high and dry.” Just like that. It’s just that easy to slip back into this partnership.

He watches Roland reach for the fresh beers. Over-warm in the bar, he can still feel that cop’s hand on him. He glances sidelong at Roland, watches the bob of his throat as he drinks. Not for the first time, he imagines Roland’s hands on him. He hates himself more than a little for the thought. He can’t find the right thing to blame for it.

 

 

 

 

Wayne lifts a magazine off the rack. JULY 1996. He looks up at the the wall behind the registers. Borders bookstore. He glances out the window. They’re in a strip mall. He knows this place, got the Mexican place on the corner, the good tacos. Closed in ’98.

A cluster of people are gathered towards the back of the store. As he moves closer, he can hear his wife’s voice. A big sign stands at the edge of the crowd. Her picture, her name. He smiles softly until he sees the title of the book she’s promoting. He frowns. He never read her books, but he knows their titles. This ain’t one of them. He reads the blurb beneath her photo and the book’s title, written in a garish red. THE NEW QUEEN OF TRUE CRIME, it says.

Amelia is holding court before the crowd, composed and beautiful as ever. He doesn’t move any closer.

Wayne picks up a copy of the book stacked beside the sign. _A Return to Shoepick Lane_.

“You want a story to be something solid, unchangeable,” she is saying. "That’s what we dig for, isn’t it? It’s what we think the truth is. Unchangeable. It is, or it isn’t. Was or wasn’t. It doesn’t work that way. The more you dig, the more you find the story you’re telling?” Amelia shakes her head. “It’s gonna change.”

 

 

 

 

Wayne opens his eyes. He can hear the fire crackling even before he sees it. He stands there in his skivvies and he watches the flames jump. Not this night again. He doesn’t wanna live this night again. 

He can feel Amelia behind him. She’s speaking. She’s saying something, but he ain’t listening. He doesn’t know how long she’s been calling to him. 

He’s spent ten years trying to live with this night burning like a hole inside of him. Now he gets to live out the aftermath again.

Resolve hardens within him. He brushes past Amelia as he heads into the house. She’s still trying to talk to him; she doesn’t know yet he can’t ever talk to her about this. That they’ll both find a way to live with that. 

“I fix this now,” he finally says. There’s real fear in Amelia’s eyes, and he’s sorry about that, too. “That’s what I’ve gotta do.”

She’s looking at him like she’s not sure she knows him, and she doesn’t, does she? Not yet. They followed the edict of marriage and grew together on parallel tracks. She can’t know the man she helped make him ten years down the line. She can’t know the future; that falls to him, and even that has its limits.

“Where are you going? Wayne, talk to me.”

His keys feel reassuring and solid in his hand. He eyes the clock just behind her shoulder. 12:16 AM. 

“I gotta go see Roland.”

 

 

 

 

Whatever this is, it won’t let him see what comes next. Wayne only gets to live with the past. Like any other man, he thinks. All they got is the past. 

Guilt is a heavy thing for a man to live with. He’s known that for a long time now. He drags that guilt around him like a burden, a wrapped corpse. Guilt over what they did, over Tom, those kids, over fucking Harris James. Over what happened between himself and Roland. You want to make something right bad enough, and the universe gives you an in. Here’s your shot. Don’t fuck it up this time.

It’s the only way he can explain why this is happening to him.

 

 

 

 

Wayne drives out to Roland’s. A low headache is building behind his eyes. 

He remembers what’s supposed to come next. Mr. Hoyt. Amelia, at the Legion. “If you got somebody else, I can take it. Just say so.” He remembers that. He remembers what he said to her, too.

“The case. It’s only ever the case.”

He didn’t lie. Wayne cuts the ignition. He sits at the curb for a spell, looking at Roland’s house. The light by the front door is blown out, the house dark and uninviting. He gets out of the car. 

“The fuck makes you think I wanna see you right now,” Roland greets him. He leaves the door open though, when he turns away. 

Wayne goes in. Roland has returned to the couch and he reaches for the bottle on the coffee table. He doesn’t offer Wayne anything—not a drink, not a seat. Wayne sits down in the armchair across the coffee table from him. He watches Roland pour. Maybe this fixes things. Maybe, him here, tonight, that changes the future he ain’t lived yet. They ain’t lived. Maybe in that future, there’s no gap. No emptiness between them. No time spent apart.

“You come to apologize I expect some good goddamn groveling from you, motherfucker. On your fucking knees.” There’s a light in Roland’s eyes that Wayne’s not sure he recognizes. It’s cruel, but there’s a heat to it that leaves Wayne feeling over-warm and more than a little uncertain. He’s not used to Roland leaving him feeling unbalanced; it has always been the exact opposite between them. 

“I shouldn’t’ve,” Wayne starts, but he’s never known how to make an apology sound like he means it. Even when, especially when, he does. Because he is sorry. Roland can’t even begin to fucking imagine how sorry he is.

“Yeah, you shouldn’t’ve.” Roland tips his glass back and some of the amber liquid leaks out down his chin. He wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand. “Don’t that but cover a multitude of fucking sins.” Roland pours more into his glass but he doesn’t pick it up. Instead, he turns to face Wayne. “You think you can do what you want to people and it don’t matter.” Wayne does not think he thinks or behaves that way, but he doesn’t say anything. 

“I’m real sorry,” Wayne says instead. 

Roland scoffs. He finally picks up his glass. “Apology ain’t a good look on you, Purple.”

Wayne’s finding it hard to look at Roland. A shame; he’s spent how long wanting to be in here, in this room. With him. He forces himself to look at him. “I really am sorry,” he says. He is beginning to think this is a mistake. Everything about this—a mistake. No blessing, but a curse. A punishment. 

Roland leans back, the lazy sprawl of his body is clearly feigned—the tension is coiled so obviously in every part of him, including the hand locked around his mostly empty glass. “Alright then. Suppose I believe you. What then?”

Wayne frowns. “Forgiveness, I suspect. Typically follows a well-met apology.”

“Well-met,” Roland repeats. He rolls the words around his mouth, something filthy about it. Wayne lets that dance across his imagination before he rejects it. “You gonna tell me next things ain’t supposed to turn out like this?”

Wayne thinks the words so often himself it’s a bit like watching a ventriloquist dummy quote the thought back at him. Wayne ducks his head, hides the grin that’s trying. “I could if you want me to.”

“I got no interest in that. What’s done is done. Nothing doing fixating on the shoulda beens.” 

Wayne can’t stop the soft start of a laugh that escapes from him. It’s like a fucking rebuke to everything he’s been trying since this shit started. Before, even. The day they escorted him downstairs, the demotion hung heavy and tired around his neck, he’d seen Roland’s face. That was a face that refused to consider the shoulda beens. 

Wayne lifts his head. “I have missed you, y’know.”

“Would you shut the fuck up,” Roland says, and that gravel-thick sorrow and anger is back in his voice now, despite the gentleness of his tone. 

There’s nothing sudden or impulsive in the way Roland comes closer to him. He sets his drink down on the table and he closes the gap between them. He affords Wayne more than enough opportunity to pull back. To leave. Wayne doesn’t do that. He watches Roland, wills him to move faster, a thing he’s never gonna admit to himself. 

Roland’s breath is ragged already when he leans over the easy chair where Wayne’s sat. “You come here for any other reason, I’m gonna tell you two things: I’ll be mighty disappointed, and the door’s right there.”

Wayne says nothing. He doesn’t move. He waits as Roland brings his mouth down to his.

 

 

 

 

This never happened before. This is new.

Roland’s mouth is mean and metallic on his. Wayne can taste the sharp tang of blood when their teeth gnash against lip. Roland stinks of Jim Beam, and Wayne can taste that, too. Despite the lead up to it, there’s still that element of surprise, sudden and intimate, visceral, that makes something in his gut ache.

There are certain truths Wayne wants to believe are solid and unfixable inside of him. The case, of course, all-consuming, lashed tight to his body, a cancer growing out from the inside. There’s Amelia, lovely and soft and sharp in equal measure. And there’s Roland, buried down deep in a place he’s always feared to reach. He’s always there, despite each shift and slip through time. Wayne’s not the kind of man to let himself imagine things like this—Roland’s mouth, wet and well-practiced but frantic and clumsy against his; his hands, smaller than his own, but more demanding, more sure than Wayne’s ever been about anything. He’s not that kind of man. Never even gave himself the relief of pulling at his own cock thinking of Roland. A man like him can’t do that. You find that place inside of you you’re so ashamed of, a place so dark and buried—you engage with it, there’s no coming back from that. He knows that for certain now. His hand fits too easily around Roland’s neck; he can feel Roland getting hard when he shifts in closer against Wayne’s thigh. There's no coming back from this. 

He can’t keep a thought of Amelia in his head—everything solid and warm, known, about her gone. She’s not in this room. Soon, he won’t be either. He’ll wake, in the present. Gone. Gone, but not gone. This is part of the story now, and what’s been done’s gonna live inside the both of them for the rest of their lives. He can’t think on that either. He’s distracted: Roland is breaking himself open against him.

“You gonna call me a faggot now?” Roland is out of breath already, his voice a snarl that matches the curl of his swollen mouth, the grip he’s got on the back of Wayne’s neck. Wayne gets it: Roland wants this to hurt every which way he can make it. Wayne doesn’t have to help him.

“No,” he says. Wayne kisses him, softer, uncertain, but no less demanding. Wayne’s never made it with a man, never saw the appeal. Didn’t know he had that in him, past, present. Future. Still not sure he sees the appeal now, but it makes sense it would be Roland. Roland to test what he thought he knew about himself. About what he wanted. Who. 

Roland doesn’t want gentle. He bites at Wayne’s mouth again and Wayne pushes Roland to the floor. He goes easy. It’s as easy to follow him down. He ruts against him without thinking. A part of him wishes everything about this could be mindless, easy, but it’s anything but. It’s Roland. 

Wayne can still smell the smoke on himself. Roland’s still got a dead man’s blood under his fingernails. They’re blunt as they score down Wayne’s side, under his shirt, and he hisses, leans into it. He doesn’t think there’s forgiveness to be found in any of this—the impossibly personal details he now knows of Roland, that live inside of him, the feel of his tongue against his, the scrape of stubble along his jaw, that he likes the heavy press of his fingers against his pulse point—but maybe what he does want is absolution. Maybe he wants to tell Roland everything and ask him if not for forgiveness then if he knows how much he misses him. Past, present, future. He misses him. He’s not gonna be able to walk through this life or through time without remembering this; he’s changed their story, and he fears maybe for the worse. 

Wayne’s hips jerk at Roland’s hand when he presses down at the fly of his jeans. Wayne’s cock strains beneath and Roland chuckles low, both the sound and his breath scraping against Wayne’s face. He’s already overwhelmed and they’ve barely touched each other. 

He’s silent as Roland gets his jeans open, but it’s impossible to stay quiet once he touches him. His grip is tight and greedy and Wayne arches into it. Their bodies are clumsy and aching, too old even now for a fuck on Roland’s living room floor. He gets his breath back and he reaches for Roland’s belt.

Roland laughs but the sound is cruel. “Look at that initiative. All along, I been wasting my fucking time thinking you’re straight as an arrow.”

“We ain’t gotta talk it through,” Wayne says, shame cascading through him with each word. His hand doesn't stop moving.

“We don’t.” Roland pulls his shirt over his head and he kicks his pants down off his legs. His cock is bared and it curves up towards his belly. He jerks Wayne in a couple rough strokes that makes him leak into his hand. “Fuck me,” Roland says. 

“You don’t want that from me,” Wayne says, desperate to believe that. 

Roland grabs Wayne’s jaw tight. “Wouldn’t fucking ask for it if I didn’t want it.”

Wayne’s hesitation must make it painfully obvious he has never done this before. Roland can see it, open as a book. “Look at you, a fucking babe in the woods.” Roland’s mouth is right there, so close to his own. Wayne can’t bring himself to close that gap. Roland’s hand stills on his cock, barely moving, but the pressure is still enough for Wayne to roll his hips into his grip. “Don’t you worry. Not like you’re the first dick I ever took.” He squeezes Wayne’s cock. “Though, I will confess, you got one’ve the more sizable ones.”

“You don’t gotta butter me up, you already got me where you want me,” Wayne says, breathless. 

“Just making sure is all,” Roland says. 

Roland takes Wayne’s hand and he brings it up to his mouth. Wayne watches him, still, unmoving, breathing deep and hardly patient. Roland takes Wayne’s index finger into his mouth, gets it wet with his spit. Just as abruptly, he gets down on his hands and knees on the rough carpet, certain in what he wants. “Get to work then,” he says.

He does. He presses a hand firm against Roland's spine, runs his hand up the curve of his ass, just shy, he thinks, of worship. No place for that here; he doesn't think he could bear it. He does as he is instructed, he gets him open with his fingers, his spit. Roland is responsive as hell, twitching and gasping, bossy even as he keeps begging for more. Even here, especially here, like this, face pressed down into the carpet, his ass spread, he is unable to keep his mouth shut. 

Wayne learns quick that Roland is a mean and desperate fuck. He whines high in his throat when Wayne first pushes into him, swearing a blue streak with one common theme: don’t stop. The carpet’s rough under Wayne’s knees, abrading them raw as he moves against and into Roland. Roland has his head buried in his arms, muffling his choked-off noises that have begun to sound too much like sobs. Horror hits Wayne; no forgiveness, no fixing nothing here. He’s just taking more from the man. 

He pulls out of Roland, his breath lodged somewhere in his throat. “The fuck you stopping for?” Roland snaps, the question surprisingly solid despite his heaving breath. He twists under Wayne onto his back. His face and his chest are flushed red, sweat has slicked along his hairline and the column and dip of his throat. Something flickers over Roland’s face as he looks up at his. His mouth goes flat and grim.

“I need you to know I been trying to make things right.” Wayne’s own breath feels stuck in his chest. His heart is hammering. “I been trying.” Desperation has leeched into Wayne’s voice now, and why the fuck wouldn’t they share that, too? They’ve shared everything else about this case. This fucking case; it’s defined his whole fucking life. Past, present. Future. He’s always gonna come back to it. 

“Wayne.” It’s all Roland says, but there’s that give in his voice. Makes something unlatch inside of Wayne he didn’t know had been closed. 

“I’m sorry. You got to know that, man. I’m sorry.”

Roland’s hand claps along the side of Wayne’s neck. He arches up to meet him, his face close and familiar. “Yeah. I know. I know, man." He almost laughs, his smile small and sad but genuine. "Now shut the fuck up and fuck me.”

Roland does not turn back over—he lays down on his back. His legs spread open, and he’s reaching for Wayne. There’s a quiet inevitability to it all Wayne hadn’t recognized until now. He grunts as he pushes his cock back into him, the resistance still there, Roland’s muscles still clamping around him. He’s not gonna last, he knows that much. Roland is too tight around him, his body sweat-slick beneath him. 

Wayne buries his face in Roland’s neck to stop himself from saying anything as he rocks into him. He can feel the sting of Roland's teeth along the slope of his neck to his back, his shoulder. The words, “I’ve missed you, every time I've missed you,” keep rattling around his brain, and he knows. He fucking knows how nonsensical they would sound to Roland, but he wants him to know. He needs him to know how much is still left for them to lose. 

Roland closes his eyes when he finishes, his come splattered wet between their bodies. When he breathes in, it sounds a lot like relief. 

 

 

 

 

Wayne wakes in his own bed. The sun tilts through the open window and Amelia’s side of the bed is warm but empty. He’s surprised when he looks in the bathroom mirror and none of the marks Roland left him with are there. He can still feel them. He traces a finger where he remembers Roland’s teeth at his shoulder, and nothing. 

That was ten years ago, he reminds himself. 

He can’t resist asking Amelia about Roland as he washes the breakfast dishes.

“Roland? Roland West?”

“You got any other Rolands I should know about?”

“No, but what you want with him? It’s been years.”

That answers that, he thinks. He submerges his hands into the hot water but it’s cooled. He looks down at his hands, distorted under the water. They look so much older than the hands that were on Roland last night.

He gazes out the window. The lawn needs mowing. Fall’s coming on in a hurry and the leaves have already started to blanket the yard. Time keeps marching forward; all they got is to try and keep up. “Had a dream about him, is all. Got me to wondering.”

“You could give him a call,” Amelia says. There is too long of a pause there, the uncharacteristic hesitancy in her voice tells him she doesn’t mean it. 

“I could,” he says. He won’t. The memory of what they did is still hungry. It’s got teeth. He washes the last dish. He reorients himself in the familiarity of his own house, his yard, his wife. He tries to think of his own past. He finds it an uncomfortable mystery to him. It’s a terrible thing, he thinks, for a man to be lost in his own life.

 

 

 

 

Roland is perched on the end of the bed. He has a bottle clutched in his hand. He’s not drinking from it, just holding it, like an anchor. Wayne had closed his eyes and this is what he opens them to find.

“I know you got your objections to what we been doing,” Roland is saying, "and I respect that. You know that. You know I got nothing but respect for Amelia.”

Wayne can’t remember walking into this room, he can’t remember ever having this conversation, but he knows it all the same. He woke up here once.

“You hearing me, man?” Roland says.

“What’s the date,” Wayne says.

“What?”

“Today, what’s today’s date.”

Roland tells him. 

“June 16, 1992,” he repeats. Wayne’s eyes shift to the television. The screen is black, convex, Roland’s image stretched and wrong in it. 

He turns back to a derisive snort from Roland that’s not without its own kindness. “You counting the days you been fucking me, Romeo? Gonna get me a nice anniversary present when the time comes?”

“I just like knowing the order of things,” he says.

“Of course you do.” Roland goes quiet and Wayne is glad for it. Gives him a moment to think. 

He changed their story. He can change the story. It changes, but it doesn’t. The Purcell kids, gone. Tom, dead. Harris James, killed. That might as well all be written in stone. Maybe the only thing that gets changed is what was always meant to be. The inevitable. His eyes meet Roland’s in the mirror and Roland looks away.

“You tell me I’d spend the last two years of my life fucking around with your repressed ass, I’d a told you to go screw.” He recognizes that very resigned way Roland says it, still with that glimmer of warmth beneath it.

“Sounds like that’s what we been doing,” Wayne says after a pause. Roland snorts, shakes his head.

“You’re all I got, you know.” He doesn’t lift his eyes back to Wayne’s until the sentence has already left his mouth, and even then, he looks to Wayne’s reflection in the mirror rather than the man himself.

Wayne does know and he doesn’t. The story is different now. The last two years, Wayne thinks. There is a shared language between the two of them in this room, written in the years he has yet to witness. So much he ain’t fixed, but this—he hasn’t lost Roland. Not yet. They both watch each other in the reflection of the mirror, separated yet together. 

Wayne moves towards the bed. To Roland. He’ll stay a little while longer then. There’s still time.

 

 

 


End file.
